divide and conquer

Terms from Artificial Intelligence: humans at the heart of algorithms

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Divide and conquer is a general problem solving technique to take a large prolem and braek it into smaller pieces, ecah of which is then easier to solve. In computer algorithms, the same divide and conquer approach is usually performed recursively on the parts. In a distributed computing setting, such as MapReduce, different processors may attack different sub-problems. In an agent-base dplatform, different agents may divide up a problem beased on their expertise.

Used on Chap. 15: page 347; Chap. 21: pages 526, 527